Multimedia Dynamite

Not surprisingly, MPlayer understands close to 12 subtitle formats, and it
has its own MPSub format too. The options for subtitle display are the
richest I have seen. You can display subtitles in any size, any position
on the video, move them dynamically with the keyboard, adjust the delay,
change the transparency, format them into multiple lines and so on.

Here is the most basic usage of the file subtitles.txt:

FORMAT=TIME
# first number : wait this much after
# previous subtitle disappeared
# second number : display the current
# subtitle for this many seconds
2 3
What is going on?
4 3
How are you doing?
8 3
You are wrong!
0 3
A long long, time ago...
in a galaxy far away...
0 3
Naboo was under an attack.
0 200
I don't understand this.

Tell MPlayer to use this file with a command like this:

$ mplayer -sub subtitles.txt
↪-font ~/.ttffonts/Verdana.ttf video.avi

This next command dumps the subtitles file into the srt format into
the file dumpsrt.sub in the current directory:

$ mplayer -sub subtitles.txt video.avi -dumpsrtsub

You can take a quick look at all subtitles in the file by pressing
the Y and G keys. Of course, you can specify multiple subtitle
files, and you can switch between them.

Create Screenshots

Want to take screenshots with MPlayer? It's easy. Here's a sample command
to use when you start to play a video:

$ mplayer -vf screenshot video.avi

Press S when you want to take a screenshot. If you want a screenshot
every five seconds, try the following command:

$ mplayer -vo png -vf screenshot -sstep 5 video.avi

What if you want to take a screenshot of every frame? Set MPlayer to
accept slave commands with a FIFO, and type these commands:

Toggle the screenshot process with the following command while the
video is playing:

$ echo 'screenshot 1' > /tmp/fifo

You might want to use the -vf spp,scale=1024:768 switch to get full-screen
screenshots.

Even More Power

There's much more MPlayer can do. You can encode image files into
a video and extract frames into image files with MPlayer. You also
can watch analog television with the tv:// option and watch DVB channels
with the dvb:// option. It supports a wide variety of streaming
protocols,
including RTP, RTSP, MMS, SDP and LIVE5555 streaming.

Discover the Power Yourself

The following command lists the available filters:

$ mplayer -af help

The man page and MPlayer's HTML documentation have more thorough descriptions of
its options. Typing:

$ mplayer -vo help

lists the compiled video output drivers.

You can play an arbitrary audio file with the video using:

$ mplayer video.mpg -audiofile audio.aac

Of course, MPlayer can play a wide variety of audio and video media
files. The following commands list them:

$ mplayer -vo help
$ mplayer -ao help

Try using the -audio-demuxer switch along with -rawaudio.

I hope this gets you started in discovering the awesome power
of MPlayer.
Enjoy your multimedia experience!

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